


How Much Do I Invest?

by Anonymous



Category: Pocket Monsters: X & Y | Pokemon X & Y Versions
Genre: F/F, cisswap au, that means cis woman Augustin and cis woman Lysandra for any confused parties
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-20
Updated: 2014-04-20
Packaged: 2018-01-20 03:56:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1495681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>10-piece writing exercise for examining what differences, if any, being women would have made in the relationship between the Professor and her leonine friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How Much Do I Invest?

**Author's Note:**

> This is extremely unpolished work, but I got a request on tumblr to post it here, presumably for bookmarking purposes, so here we are. All music is linked to at the head of the section. The premise of the writing exercise is simple: create a shuffled playlist, and write one scene for each song, limited by the amount of time it takes to play the song three times so as to keep the whole approximately in line with the listening length of the playlist itself. And, just a heads up, the style gets non-chronological and pretentious as fuck because, did I mention this was never meant to be seen off-tumblr?

[ **I. Cardiac Arrest** ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N83eCpPua_A)

Augustin is a woman, and that’s more than enough trouble in her life without turning out gay too. So, when she spends too long studying legs and curves and hair, she turns it around. Makes it analytical, even competitive. Legs like that, she shouldn’t be wearing leggings. Hair that long, and it’s a broken up, frizzed out mess of poor care. Complexion too cool for that shade of green. Concealer that doesn’t conceal, and contours that look like fingerpaint.

It’s easy to do. She’s always had an eye for people, and it’s only gotten sharper as she learned how to deal with the culture clash of Sinnoh or the constant muddled confusion every time she showed up for a first meeting in a skirt, because they weren’t expecting hips and painted lips attached to a name like Augustin.

With Lysandra, it’s a little more difficult to spin the illusion. But she manages. Lysandra, who paints her face imperceptibly, not drawing attention to anything, but merely turning herself into something cool and flawless. Lysandra who dresses like a man, but only in that she stays covered and illusory every day, in suits that are- well, of course they are- designed to flatter her at every angle. Lysandra, with her hair so vivid that it ought to make her skin look washed out and half dead, though it  _doesn’t_.

She spends too long thinking about Lysandra, and it’s never as cruel as it is with the other women she compares herself too. Never as compensatory. She promises herself that Lysandra is just an idol, someone to be looked up to and admired. And nothing more.

She drapes herself over Lysandra’s broad shoulders when she catches her sitting down. She leaks into prone positions and casts her calves or head into Lysandra’s lap. She toys with her soft, smooth hair with detached idleness, like she would a pen or a paperclip.

She doesn’t think about the stutter in her thoughts.

Just smooths it over with concealer that doesn’t conceal.

[ **II. Tongue Tied** ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1x1wjGKHjBI)

She never goes  _out_ anymore. Somewhere between returning to Kalos and winning her prestigious title, Augustin dropped out of the amateur battle rings that helped Lamium reach her final evolution.

Now, she has also stopped trawling through seedy bars with a dragon on her belt and too much gloss on her lips. Stopped collecting her peers and her assistants and casting terrible, impromptu parties in her postage stamp flat or careening hooting and hollering into unsuspecting clubs with a dozen overwrought academics ready to put all that brainpower into something just shy of a riot.

The entire thought of it all just makes her feel tired.

She knows that if she actually  _tried_ , if she actually left her office and put on her prettiest dresses and invited herself out to a bar or three, she’d enjoy it. She would dance with strange men, and she would flirt endlessly as her mind slipped into that old, familiar pattern. She would twitch only a little, flinch once or twice, but nothing that couldn’t be hidden away with any number of excuses.

She would love it.

But she doesn’t think, in the dim grey that has settled over her since October, that she wants to bother loving things. 

The parade. The parade had been noise and color and music, her darling students, her sweet hearted assistants, her city, her  _region!_  A cacophony of celebration and life. She had been swept up into it easily. That’s how she knows, if she tried, she could make herself be happy again.

For a while.

Stolen hours in stolen days.

But does she really want to? She has work to do. Serena has been recording every bit of information about her mega evolving pokémon. It’s such a blessing to have her on the team, even if death sits on her hips like a child’s toy.

She should just.

Work.

**[III. Morocco](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tyIorLkbU4) **

Kiloude would be lovely. It wouldn’t be far enough.

She’s been working overtime for months now. She has the vacation days, and eerily enough, the savings. Not going anywhere but work and home for half a year, and living entirely on questionable sandwiches, seems to do that for a bank account.

So, instead of the TGV, she slides into the cool, recycled air of an aerostat passenger carriage, and sleeps for fourteen hours. Which, admittedly, shouldn’t be so easy to do. But she’s tired lately.

She doesn’t let herself think about that, sliding off the information like she used to slide off of the backs of chairs and onto warm knees.

She dreams of sounds and colors and gemstone flowers.

She wakes up when an air hostess kindly informs her that they have reached their destination.

The sun is blindingly hot. The air is heavy with evaporated seawater, and even though they must be miles from the beach, there is already sand clinging to the sidewalks.

She checks in at her hotel in a daze, and wanders to the water.

Lamium and Dandelion are let out to play, frolicking through the surf. The Sylveon keeps trying to trip her sister, ribbons winding around the Garchomp’s ankles. Right up until Lamium launches into the air, and Dandelion has to dangle, crying, from her foot.

They’re having so much fun.

Augustin finds herself smiling as she watches them.

The sun is too bright, the surf is too loud, her pokémon are too gleeful. For the first time in what seems an eternity, she feels warmth slipping into her bones.

[ **IV. Thunder Clatter (Twin Shadow)** ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YfQQUzKneg)

She returns from her vacation covered in ridiculous freckles and with burns on the back of her shoulders where she couldn’t quite get the lotion.

She feels lighter and brighter, and the vivacity of Lumiose no longer shoves at her on all sides in a claustrophobic press. 

Its her city, hers, hers. It is home in a way Kiloude hasn’t been since she was a child. People have lived entire lives in the circles-in-circles of Lumiose. Poets have waxed mourning and prophetic about it for centuries.

It thuds in her chest in lieu of her heart, which she sometimes lets herself think of as cold and dead.

Sina and Dexio are relieved when they see her hard at work on the first day. She can feel it rolling off of them in waves. Can see it in the way Sina’s fingers fuss with the hem of her dangerously short skirt rather than fisting tight and anxious at her sides. In the way Dexio doesn’t force himself to grin at her, but rather, just smiles lightly and lopsided.

"Welcome back, Professor!" They pipe, voices overlapping, and she thinks that they are referring to something a little different than a trip overseas.

"Serena and Calem were here, while you were gone. He’s been-"

"Moving to Shalour! He’s going to keep trying! Also, to try and start battle cafés outside Lumiose!" Sina cuts Dexio off, and Augustin actually laughs. More at the way he just lets her do it. It’s a new world out there. One where young blond men simply accept that rambunctious brown women are, sometimes, their seniors in a technical setting. And don’t question it.

Augustin is glad she was part of building that, in whatever small way.

She dismisses them to return to their data collection- pokédexes don’t fill themselves, and young Trevor can only do so much. Sonia comes to check on her next, eyes narrow and suspicious behind her frameless glasses.

"What time are you leaving, tonight, Professor?" She asks, tacking on the title like an afterthought. She is not so easily convinced as the young assistants. 

"Perhaps 19h. I want to be out early enough that all the decent restaurants aren’t full yet. I haven’t got anything at home worth looking twice at, after three weeks overseas."

Sonia looks doubtful, still. But more trusting.

Augustin is surely improving.

**[V. Losing Touch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2S8vC-Yujs) **

"Oh, Lysandra," Augustin sighed, draping herself over the taller woman’s shoulders dramatically. It was really only a position she could get in when she caught Lysandra sitting down for once, rather than standing around looking statuesque and terrifying. 

She took advantage to the fullest, arms hanging limp down her chest, chin balanced in the juncture of shoulder and neck. She nuzzled at Lysandra’s jaw affectionately, which was finally the point at which the other woman had reached her tolerance. “Yes, Augustin?”

"Lys-bliss, light of my life, fire of my city," Augustin waxed on, only cutting to the point when Lysandra shifted hard enough to shut Augustin’s jaw with a click. She scuttled on, though she kept her perch. "You’re working too much. Come to dinner with me. We can go to my flat afterwards and drink until I puke. It’ll be lovely."

"I fail to see the appeal of holding your hair back while you vomit."

"That’s because you don’t get out enough. You’re going to kill yourself and you know it. Even I know it! I have students, I’ve watched people burn themselves out over a project! Taking breaks is important." She dragged out long vowels, voice skirting on the edge of whining. She was thirty seven years old, which was much too old for this sort of childish behaviour. But Lysandra was serious enough for the both of them, and a few others beides. It was Augustin’s civic duty to be whiny and petulant.

"Augustin, I have work to do, and only I am qualified to-" Augustin slipped around the desk chair, and flung herself into Lysandra’s lap with a huff, legs dangling over her arm and forcing her to drop it away from her keyboard.

"Nope. Dinner. And you’ve earned a film, for resisting. You’re taking me to go see that horrible movie with the angry, tattooed santa. That’s happening. We’re going right now."

Lysandra sighed heavily, but rolled the chair back nonetheless.

This was Augustin’s favorite part. The capitulation that only came with a show of brute strength.

She cackled wildly as Lysandra stood sharply, carrying her like a bride for a good four paces before dropping her in a heap on the floor. She yelped, but she was still laughing. The bruises were worth it.

She wondered if next time she should try kissing Lysandra silent instead of just flopping all over her like a leggy fish.

She didn’t let herself wonder very hard.

[ **VI. Animal** ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM7Hlg75Mlo)

No, no, no, no, no.

"No."

Augustin wasn’t sure if she was thinking it or saying it, or a mixture of both. Her heart was racing hard enough to seal her throat. She felt hunted in a way she hadn’t since Lamium had evolved. No one picked a fight with a woman who walked with dragons. That was what her grandmother had said before giving her a pudgy little Gible when she was ten. 

She felt sick. No. She felt as if someone else was sick, and they seemed to be doing it in her body, without her. 

Raze the world, Lysandra said. Wipe the slate clean. Wars and consumption and weapons.

"No, no, no."

That wasn’t right. Lysandra wasn’t a monster. She was a Queen, as dark and terrible as such women had to be. But she wasn’t a  _murderer_.

This was wrong. Something was wrong here.

Augustin’s fingers were shaking. She learned this not by feeling them, but by watching as she failed to hit the send button on her four four times. She finally connected on the fifth. 

"P-professor?" Dexio sounded so nervous. They had Holocasters. Everyone on the team had them! They were helpful for recording quick videos of wild pokémon, sending them back to the central labs for group analysis on the fly.

They must have seen it too.

"My lights," She greeted in code, with a flush of wild relief. Her voice was smooth and steady. She was their teacher and their leader, and she might not have Sina’s fine eye for combat or Dexio’s keen sense for stretegy, but she was their bastion nonetheless. 

"Oh. Yes, of." She heard Dexio clear his throat. Could almost see him slipping into the mantle. "Madame. What do you need us to do?"

"It’s in either Lumiose or Geosenge." Augustin informs them. Geosenge. Where Lysandra had been buying out renters and business owners for two years. Planning to make a resort town and nature reserve.

Should Augustin have caught this? 

"You cannot separate. Lys-" Her voice cracked, and she forced herself past it. "Lysandra is a talented fighter, and so are most of her staff."

Oh. Oh she  _should_ have seen this. It seems so obvious now.

She should have stopped it.

"You will both need to be together if you find her."

Dexio’s Porygon had one of the longest and most accurate teleportation ranges of any pokémon the Professor had ever had the privilege to study. They could travel easily from their current assignment in Anistar to either of the two locations. But not to both.

"Madame. Which-"

"Dexio. You have never been wrong before. I, on the other hand. I have made a severe misjudgement. I cannot determine it rationally. You have to, in my stead. I trust you."

There was a long, aching silence, and then. “We’re returning to Lumiose. Her café. The building is empty behind it, and large enough to-“

"All right. Go. It is all going to be _fine._ " Augustin hoped beyond measure that she wasn’t lying.

**[VII. Up On and Over](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63zPCyKdtEs) **

When they met, the first time, they were really both children. Still students, still gawky and growing into themselves.

Augustin crouched down in enormous sweaters that hid her from the crawling eyes of men she had not learned to laugh at yet. Lysandra was already so tall, filling out every day, and collected scraps of femininity in frilled skirts and provocative blouses, trying to mitigate the rumours that she was a giantess stepping out of a fantasy novel.

Looking back on that, was it so surprising that they evolved as they did?

Augustin had so envied Lysandra’s willingness to put herself on display. Lysandra had so envied Augustin’s utter disregard for personal aesthetics.

Between their silly shared idolatry, they had made each other.

And then Augustin had  _left_.

Six years was a long time for twenty somethings.

But, starting over again when she had returned from thin, tight, tiresome, beautiful Sinnoh, they had still seen the indelible marks they’d made on eachother.

In Augustin’s low blouses, her tight belts and short skirts with stockings just tall enough to leave strips of bare white thigh two fingers wide. In the artful fall of her carefully styled hair, and the sharp accents of her perfectly painted face. In the way she had become eyes and lips and hair and hips and legs and skin.

In Lysandra’s suits, fitted enough to be feminine, but still shielding her from the eyes of others almost completely. In the way she wore her hair, severe and practical and easily maintained, for all that it was long enough to strangle a man thrice over. Straight and shining and almost entirely unfussed with. The way she wore her pressed powders and colorless chapstick just heavily enough to look almost natural, in an unnaturally flawless way.

In their shared loves and their divergent tastes, half and half again. Stolen back and forth from eachother.

They were as responsible for they way the other turned out as for themselves.

They were responsible for what each other had become.

Lysandra had become a madwoman bent on euthanizing an entire planet.

Augustin was responsible for that.

[ **VIII. Icarus (And Now The Weather)** ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kASM9OI4P0)

No one has hair that red.

No one.

It’s unnatural.

It had added to Lysandra’s strangely mythic carriage. To her fantasy reputation.

Augustin sees it in her dreams sometimes. Bright and searing, a bloody gash in reality. No one has hair that red.

She dreams it less frequently as the months slip by into years.

Four and a half of them. She barely thinks about Lysandra at all.

Diantha is retiring. Serena is trying to work out if she can maintain her adjunct research position at the labs after being elected Champion.

Sina and Dexio are getting married, and it is exceedingly difficult to convince a porygon and a gigalith to breed even without having to keep the entire process a secret from their trainers. But the egg will be a worthwhile gift. Better than matched pair of illumise and volbeat.

Trevor is working his way steadily through the rungs and hoops of academia. Once he graduates, he wants to come and work for the Professor full time. 

There is simply so much happening, lately. She cannot afford to think about women better left dead.

No one has hair that red. 

No one.

That she thinks she sees a glance of it, a searing heart-of-coal flash from the corner of her eye as she leaves the Nursery with her cargo in hand, is coincidence only.

Probably just a Roselia or. Or a Ledian.

No one has hair that red.

It just doesn’t happen.

[ **IX. Sparklers** ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChWK9RcG1gY)

She only ever kissed Lysandra once, and she barely remembers it.

Lysandra was huge and sour and didn’t ever get drunk as quickly as Augustin did, with her sliver of a figure and her collegiate relationship with alcohol.

They’d had an enormous fight, a few weeks before hand. 

Lysandra had invited, then demanded, then very nearly _begged_ Augustin to come and work with her. To leave behind her labs and her students and her very comfortable life to participate in another of Lysandra’s philanthropic ventures.

It was so tempting. So dangerously, poisonously tempting. Eighty percent of Lysandra’s staff were women, for a start. There would be no answering to a grant board of crotchety old men who saw long legs and full lips and thought she was inferior. There would be freedom to do as she saw fit, rather than abiding by arbitrary rules set four or five centuries back.

But her students.

She couldn’t just  _leave_ them. How few women there were for them to look up to already. How few safe and sheltered spaces for young biologists with the audacity to have a bustline and soprano voices. She couldn’t deny them that.

Lysandra has been so upset. Had actually yelled at her. She was so frightening, in that moment, with her heavy hands grinding at the bones of Augustin’s shoulders. Shaking her like a ragdoll. Augustin had been crying, and Lysandra had been turning ugly shades of red-violet.

Augustin had thought distantly that she might die there.

They hadn’t spoken for over a month. 

Then Augustin had gotten blind drunk in a fit of self pity, and thrown up all over the sidewalk. Washed her mouth out with half a gin and tonic and called for a cab.

She had also given Lysandra’s address rather than her own.

When the door opened, she flung herself into the large woman’s chest, teary and intoxicated, and begged her not to be angry anymore. 

"Please, please, I love you too much to let you hate me. Please, you mustn’t. Please, please, please."

And then she had stared up at Lysandra. It was such a long way up. She barely had the co ordination for it. To curl onto her toes and heave down on Lysandra’s shoulders, and press her mouth messily to Lysandra’s own.

Again, and again, six, eight. Awkward, moist, terrible kisses, smearing lurid red lipstick across Lysandra’s lips.

And not so much as a flutter of reaction.

"I’m sorry, please, please, I’m so sorry." She had offered, as if speaking the words directly into Lysandra’s mouth would make her understand the depth of that apology.

"Augustin." Lysandra had finally said, and her voice was so tight around the cold anger that had punctuated their month apart that Augustin couldn’t bear it. She had forced her way past Lysandra and into her richly furnished home, through the living room and down the hall, to the turquoise guest room that had always been hers. 

She locked the door, and cried until she thought her eyes might bleed, and slept for an eternity.

The next afternoon, when she woke up, Lysandra had made her an entire platter of ridiculously tiny spinach tarts with broiled quail eggs on top and she’d laughed herself sick- literally- because who kept quail eggs in their fridge, and furthermore, who fed quail eggs to a hungover assailant who had commandeered their guest room?

Apologies and absolution, in the form of pastries.

Wasn’t that just typical.

[ **X. Your Surrender** ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcEuRT7rrP4)

_She only kissed Lysandra once._

_ No one had hair that red. _

_Serena who wears death on her hip like a child’s toy._

_Calem, always grasping at her coattails, because life only catches up to death when it ends._

Augustin dreams in achey aneurysm colors and earbleeding white-pink-grey noise.

And she heaves awake with a violent start, because there is a figure in her bedroom, and it is not Lamium, though it is tall enough.

It isn’t Dandelion, though it carries a perfume of dry and bitter spice over petal sweet.

_"No, no, no, no, no." Whispered with clutching panic._

_This is her fault. She’s responsible for this._

_They don’t speak for a month. Is that when it happened?_

_The sun blinds bright off the surf and she feels warm again. Alive, instead of an ambulatory corpse._

"You’re dead."

"Of course."

"Or if not dead, then buried all the same."

The figure moves, bobbing barely shorter. Its tail swishes limply. It could be any number of things, black on slightly softer black. It looks like a nod.

_She drapes herself over broad shoulders. She rests her head on muscled thighs. She clings to a strong arm. She buries her face into a soft neck. She is lifted up like a child._

_She is shaken like a very different sort of child._

_She toys with long, red hair that smells like black pepper and sweet william. Like sunflowers and sunfire._

"Have you come to be my psychopomp? I think I’m rather young to die."

"You will always be too young to die."

"That won’t stop me, will it?"

It shakes its head.

_Life._

_Death._

_Balance._

_Three dimensions on a plotted chart._

"We will have to travel, then. Everywhere we can. Just never stop moving. So that while you’re wandering around turning into a mad king, you can have memories of me everywhere that you go."

"That’s a bit presumptuous, don’t you think?"

"Standing over a woman’s bed when you died six years ago is infinitely more  _presumptuous_.”


End file.
